DOUBLE TAP TO ZOOM WITH PHONE OR TABLET Many moons ago, actually about 559 moons ago, I founded an early childhood program with Tina Staller, a gracious dancer and teacher. We were both graduates of a short-lived but wonderful teacher edu­ cation program located at The Prospect School in North Bennington, Vermont. Antioch New England Graduate School accredited the pro- gram for a few years, so our degrees came from there, and when a branch of the graduate school moved to Harrisville, New Hampshire, we went along to start The Harrisville School. Harrisville, and most New Hampshire public schools, didn’t offer public kindergarten at that point. Preschools were few and far between in the rural Monadnock Region, so The Harrisville School served four- and five-year-olds from five surrounding towns. Up on top of a hill at the end of a steep dirt road on the shabby cam- pus of a long-closed boys’ school, our little school was a beehive of progressive education busyness. With precious few school administra- tors or state educational bureaucrats looking over our shoulders, we created a thriving little school, based on the principles of the integrated day from British infant schools. We implemented a child-­centered cur- riculum and created a school that felt like home, preserved the magi- cal world of early childhood, and gave children ample opportunities to play in and explore the natural world. We spent lots of time outside, wandered in the woods, used vege­ tables from parents’ gardens to make snack, made pottery, built a playground from scratch, and crafted mud pies. It wasn’t quite a na- ture preschool or a forest kindergarten as described in this book, but we were often immersed in the natural world. While mostly working with young children, we also taught a course for aspiring teachers. For one of those classes, I took a group of adults into the woods behind the school for an afternoon of water play. We found a little stream, dammed it up, created a little village, created miniature people—and then we left it intact. The next day, I brought my four-year-olds out for a walk in the woods, and we came upon this little village. Right away, all the children jumped in to play in this stream world. There was no question about where this had come from; the children seemed to intuitively know that fairies and gnomes had made this village just for them. And this convinced us teachers that what we were doing indoors and outdoors with children was exactly what they needed. After three or four years of early childhood experience, I migrated into higher education with a focus on elementary teacher prepara- tion. That’s where I stayed for much of the next three decades, with 2 2 David Sobel COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL